this: to the bitch next door, to the postman, to the sour-puss clerk in the tackle shop, to the radio repairman and certainly to the conniving and grasping housekeeper Russell was too timid to fire, she had to repeat herself. “No one knows what mettle I am made of.” Pedal, pedal.
So she had mounted the bicycle and left the Lantana house overlooking Lake Worth, quite aware of herself as a glamorous heiress in a Technicolor movie and wishing she could see the glimmering shards of her own dazzling charisma as she passed. “You don’t know me. I do not back down.”
Every car slowed—some hooted. At first, she waved back gaily, holding the bicycle as steady as she could on the gravelly shoulder of the roadbed. They admired her, Hubba Hubba! She ought to have put a sign on the back of her shirt: California or Bust.
Within the first hour, pedaling along roads she habitually drove, she realized that her outfit was ludicrous. She looked like a Great White Hunter off in search of a lost herd of elephants. Whatever had possessed her?
And she had waited too close to noon to start out. The morning temperatures were already in the nineties. The more she struggled under the blazing sun, the less she enjoyed bicycling.
But she had stick-to-it-iveness. Russell had admired that about her: Phyllis did not waffle. Not only did she damn well do what she said she would, she was who she said she was. For the present, she had plenty of time to ruminate about her virtues. She was young, and she believed she had a charming bonny accent, and she felt that her beauty weakened men and aggravated women. She told herself that she was a star, that the world was her oyster.
But perhaps she would be wise to stay off of the major roads and head off for the green cool kudzu that covered and protected the abandoned trucks and barns of the families now torn apart by war. So many vine-tented farms had been abandoned by their men drafted away in the fight for freedom. So she turned to where the scarlet hibiscus grew, to the lantana and away from the oleander medians. She told herself to change directions.
She had started out on the South Dixie, pedaled over to Lake Worth Road then west, heading for the Florida Turnpike. Carefully folded in her shirt pocket was the map gone soggy now, and she was too bushed to swing off the bicycle and fight her slipping pack to trace out a tree-covered cooler route. She did not feel free and liberated; she was not as she had imagined herself, coasting down hills, the wind in her hair and a broad smile on her face.
Bugs hit her teeth if she parted her lips, they speckled her neck.
The late February air was heavy, a steady wind swept off the Atlantic at her back, drivers honked, convoy trucks that ground past at ‘victory speed’ forced her from her steady path to the side of the road. War Bond billboards mildewed in the humidity. Burma Shave. Swamps.
Barely two hours of searing sun and still looking even more and more like a drenched freak, she was on the verge of collapse. She could no longer fight the shifting pack and shotgun on her back, so she gave up and searched for her first overnight stop. Of course, she had planned to rely upon the soothing comforts of the advertised, clean, well-equipped Texaco stations for short breaks in her journey, and at night, to sleep in small, scrupulous Swiss-run tourist inns which must exist.
But now having turned to go along the inland route, she toiled past stinking motels thrown up for truck drivers and the railroad workforce. On her first night at a Y in the road, she bought a roadside meal for a dollar and in a rundown room shared her bed with cockroaches. All through the humid darkness, the trains clacked past whistling into the night, rocking GIs from their poker games by swaying them to sleep while Phyllis swatted flies, sweating naked under musty, line-dried sheets.
The following day was the same: under a shade tree adjacent to a stream and even doused with D.D.T., she was driven away from her midday exhaustion and earned rest by a million hungry mosquitoes. At most she had come forty miles in two days. Her tires melted on the asphalt and it was not yet summer. She went another sodden mile, trying to outrun the ravenous swarms at her back. Bugs by the millions, hatching young and hungry everywhere in the kudzu, under the sugarcane plume grass. What had made her think that a tree-lined road would be pleasant?
Forsaking her green dream of a ride through the countryside, she turned east again toward the Dixie Highway, retracing her way. At least the motels would be adequate winter fare for pale women from Detroit and their pneumonia-riddled sun-starved children. So what if people stared at her and whooped and yelled as though she was a deluded runaway.
She didn’t care anymore. She turned back and was actually surprised to stumble across her first Texaco Station on a connecting road to the coast. Delirious, she pulled into it. The promised Texaco smile floated above great moons of underarm sweat staining the proprietor’s careless uniform. His doughy face changed to a leer when he noticed that she was completely alone. Then he saw the shotgun. Not a .45. So he turned down the radio and stood closer to her.
“’Bout the most I can do is pump your tires, Miss.”
“No, thank you,” she said, out of breath, ready to faint. She tipped the bike sideways and let it fall, too tired to throw her leg over the bar, too exhausted and discouraged to return the smile.
He owed her something, something that had been promised in the slick, half-page Texaco advertisements. A cool place to rest in the shade, some pampering. Hospitality. Maybe even a Coca-Cola.
She was pointed in the direction of the clean bathroom where she was repulsed by the sight of the piss-stains under the toilet seat still up from the last hundred men who’d used it. The dried urine on the floor flaked yellow and sticky from the one-hundred-ten-percent humidity. She found an unwrapped roll of toilet paper and tore into it. One essential rationed during this war was toilet paper. Kleenex too had gone the way of great puffin. After she used some and helped herself to more, she replaced it on the sink and returned to confront the same proprietor with his eager idiotic look.
Now, he turned up the sound on his radio. He tapped his foot to the sound of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” bobbing his head, never taking his eyes off her. Raising her voice, she announced, “I think you had best clean up the bathroom.”
“Don’t expect women in here too much nowadays. Rationing’s loosening up though. We get more gas.” She gave him a weak nod, took a deep breath, and exhaled. His shirt said, CLYDE.
“It’s bloody hot!”
“You’re not from here, I can tell,” he said, congratulating himself on his close observation. She defined herself by not having a drawl as she addressed him as though he were her servant.
“I’ll be needing a place for the night, if you get my meaning.” What she meant was, clean, fit for a queen.
“Now, lady, my wife’d blow me sky high!”
She gave him a hollow laugh and in the end, he directed her to a house owned by a widow-lady who let out rooms. He reached in his shirt and scratched his belly. “If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll take you by there.” He winked. “I can show you a real good time.”
“You are quite mistaken. I’m not that sort of girl.” Drained and discouraged, she readjusted her rucksack, checked Russell’s gold Bulova watch on her wrist for the time, centered the shotgun case and hefted her weary leg over the bar to set out for the widow’s place.
“No more than three miles, and most of ‘em’s flat.”
Three miles took over an hour. She was dehydrated, fatigued and in a very dark humor. No one to blame but herself. There are canals and rivers enough in Florida, she could easily have taken a canoe and gotten halfway to hell, farther than riding this goddamned bike. Bloody fool that she was. Florida was crisscrossed with options superior to pedaling a bike.
“My word, ain’t you a sight!” Mabel Sue said, hands on hips, an apron over her cotton dress. Phyllis could barely speak.
“Clyde,” she uttered.
“Don’t I just know it? He called and said you wanted a room for the night. That’ll be